For those disinclined to believe in coincidence, the date of the terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo, January 7, and that of the publication of Michel Houellebecq’s latest novel, Soumission (Submission), in which a Muslim is elected President of France, were linked in some unspecified way, though it will now never be known precisely in what way.1 Certainly the novel had received an enormous amount of publicity before publication, so that almost everyone knew of its central conceit. If the novel is dead, as many have claimed, its ghost is certainly able still to haunt us.
Houellebecq is a writer with a single underlying theme: the emptiness of human existence in a consumer society devoid of religious belief, political project, or cultural continuity in which, moreover, thanks to material abundance and social security, there is no real struggle for existence that might give meaning to the life of millions. Such a society will not allow you to go hungry or to live in the abject poverty that would once have been the reward of idleness, whether voluntary or involuntary. This, in Houellebecq’s vision of the world, lends an inspissated pointlessness to all human activity, which becomes nothing more than a scramble for unnecessary consumer goods that confer no happiness or (at best) a distraction from that very emptiness. For Houellebecq, then, intellectual or cultural activity becomes mere soap opera for the more intelligent and educated rather than something of intrinsic importance or value.
